The head of the federal agency charged with enforcing the Hatch Act argues that the 72-year-old law needs to be overhauled because it is preventing qualified candidates from running for office.

“The federal agency I lead, the United States Office of Special Counsel, enforces a law that is broken and needs to be fixed,” writes Carolyn N. Lerner in Monday’s New York Times.

The Hatch act, passed in 1939 and meant to limit partisan political activity among federal employees, can at times be used as a “political weapon” to keep candidates from running for office, Lerner argues.

“[A]t its worst, the law prevents would-be candidates in state and local races from running because they are in some way, no matter how trivially, tied to a source of federal funds in their professional lives,” writes Lerner.

The agency head cites the absurd case of a police officer who could not run for a local school board because his bomb-sniffing dog is funded by the federal government, and the case of a would-be county legislature candidate who could not run because the Albany, N.Y., port for which he oversees finances got stimulus funds.

“Increasingly, the act is being used as a political weapon to disqualify otherwise well-qualified candidates, even when there is no indication of wrongdoing,” says Lerner, and the alternative - giving up one’s day job to run for office - is not feasible without a personal source of wealth.

Lerner claims that proposed legislation that she has sent Congress to fix the law would cost taxpayers nothing and would allow qualified candidates to run for office.

“Congress needs to clarify the law’s definitions of ‘political activity’ and of ‘federal workplace,’ among other reforms,” she wrote in a letter to Congress earlier this month. “The Hatch Act injects the federal government into state and local contests thousands of times a year, its penalties are inflexible and sometimes unfair, and it is out?of?date with the 21st century workplace.”